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A Technical History of Apple's Operating Systems
An anonymous reader writes "As part of his 1680-page book Mac OS X Internals: A Systems Approach, Amit Singh of kernelthread.com wrote a very detailed technical history of Apple's operating systems. Since he had to cut down on the history chapter because of the book's already too-large size, most of this chapter didn't make it to the printed book. Singh has made available the history chapter as a free PDF. The file is 140 pages long, and is generously filled with figures and screenshots. It starts with the internals of the original Apple I and goes through a tour of all operating systems Apple dabbled with, including internals of A/UX, Lisa OS, and such. It even covers details of outside influences like the Xerox Alto, STAR System, Smalltalk, and Sketchpad, and closer to home things like Mach, NeXTStep, and OpenStep."
It's not so much that Apple "decided" to stick with the classic Mac OS for so long despite Win95/98 as much as that they were just in a total mess in terms of their next gen OS stuff. Apple spent a lot of the 90's trying to figure out a new Mac OS, and a lot of the future was supposed to be in the original projects codenamed Copland and Gershwin (the original Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9...... what eventually came out as Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9 had little to do with this). Copland was originally supposed to be a totally modern OS, and Gershwin would apparently have had even more radically new elements, a lot borrowed from the Taligent collaboration with IBM on an OS codenamed "Pink". But none of this ever panned out, and all Apple could do was release the commercial Mac OS 8 and Mac OS 9 OS's as stopgaps. Apple had considered buying BeOS once it became clear that the internal Copland project wasn't working out, and they ultimately ended up buying NeXT. For all intents and purposes, Apple became NeXT, and Mac OS X can be seen in many ways as the ultimate development of NextStep, rather than the classic Mac OS.
Actually, looking through the Mac OS X Internals PDF, there's a whole section there about Apple's quest for a new OS........ this goes into a lot of detail about all the options Apple considered. This is actually some great reading if you're curious about all of this.